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Well, it's over. The Republican Slime Machine, with the help of the So-Called Liberal Media, has tarnished another good man, and this time Bush's election seems legitimate. I'm sorry that my state put our Corporate Criminal and War Monger in Chief over the top and gave him four more years to make the world hate us. I apologize to the world on behalf of the people of my state.

I showed up at my inner-city polling place (a downtown Columbus car dealership) yesterday at 6:15 AM. My voting ticket number was 1013, meaning I was the 13th person voting in my precinct. I was out the door at 6:50, about 20 minutes after the polls opened. As I walked out of the voting booth, there were about 15 people lined up to enter the booth, extending into the service bay. The line to sign in and get your voting ticket snaked through the showroom nearly to the door.

I was lucky enough to have time to get a nice relaxing breakfast and a review of the morning Dispatch in the coffeeshop downstairs from my workplace before work. Work was a deserted place early yesterday morning as most of my coworkers had waits of 2 to 2.5 hours. The Columbus Dispatch this morning was filled with reports from polling stations where people had to get out of line to go to work or they'd be late for work and possibly lose their job. The time for Saturday elections has come.

In the run-up to the election, I imagine since I live in an inner-city district, I received recorded phone messages from Chris Rock, Jesse Jackson, and a group pushing something called Election Protection, as well as both MoveOnPac and ACT.

The war for Columbus extended not only into the airwaves but also into the air, as I sighted numerous small planes downtown over the last couple days towing banners. The most intriguing of these planes towed the message: "Advest, Inc, Go Back to France." I have to admit that I have no idea who Advest is and why they should go back to France.

We also had full page advertisements from George Soros, as well as an earnest 17-year old from Canton, who claimed to have spent his college fund on this attempt to persuade us to vote for George Bush or else we will not be safe from terrorists. He would have been better off keeping his college fund for remedial English, because his writing (or 'writting' as he put it) was full of misspellings.

It's been interesting to be the center of attention here in Ohio. Normally, the only time people pay attention to us is when the Ohio State football team does something noteworthy (speaking of which, you'd think the sky was falling to hear the locals talk about the three-game losing streak). The last couple months, it's not been safe to watch TV without being barraged by political ads. I often listen to the BBC World Service, and it's been surreal to hear reporters from the Beeb doing reports from Columbus, Ohio as if the fate of the free world depended on what happened here. (Well, I suppose it did. Sorry, free world for letting y'all down. Maybe next time, if there is still a free world in four years. Dang - did I just say that? I'm trying to rein in my cynicism and bitterness but I'm failing miserably.)

Here's a local post-election story to ponder, in case you missed it. Joy Padgett, an Ohio Republican functionary of no particular distinction, won re-election to the Ohio Senate by running attack ads sliming Terry Anderson, the former journalist who was held hostage by Hizbollah in Lebanon. Well, it turns out that after his release he settled in Athens, Ohio, taught journalism at Ohio University (one of the top J-schools in the country), and now runs a restaurant there and was the Democratic candidate for Ohio Senate. His offense: he was a carpetbagger from that liberal hotbed New York, where Hilary Clinton was from, and he was a former member of the media, which made him a liberal elite, and therefore not fit to serve rural southeastern Ohio. I actually saw this ad two or three times on Columbus TV. Actually, Anderson was born in Lorain, Ohio, and grew up in Batavia, New York, between Rochester and Buffalo, and has been settled in southeastern Ohio for several years.

Another one of her tactics was printing up fliers that showed a picture of Anderson with one of his terrorist captors, claiming that it showed that Anderson was soft on terrorism. Excuse me? The world's most famous recent hostage soft on terrorism? That picture existed only because Anderson was recruited by CNN to go back to Lebanon in 1996, 5 years after his release, to do a report on post-civil war Lebanon. For that report, he confronted his former captors with a camera crew to ask them why they did it. Another item that Padgett used against Anderson was that, while he was a professor at Ohio University, he asked his students whether it was possible that US policies might have something to do with igniting Arab hatred. A pretty fair question, it seems to me, in an academic setting, from a man who spent seven years in a cell suffering for those policies.

During the campaign, a compaint was filed against Anderson for allegedly illegal corporate contributions and it was mentioned in the Columbus Dispatch and in Padgett's attack ads before a copy of the complaint was even received by Anderson. Ohio Dems suspect Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell of passing the complaint along to the media and Padgett.

These are the people who will be making the key decisions to run my state and my country for the next few years. God help us all.